New York Times, Washington Post win 3 Pulitzers each

The New York Times and The Washington Post received three Pulitzer Prizes each on Monday for a wide array of journalism that spanned conflict and injustice around the globe, including the plight of child migrant workers in the American Midwest, the lethal consequences of war in the Middle East and the brutal repression of dissent in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

The prize for public service, considered the most prestigious of the Pulitzers, went to ProPublica for exposing a web of questionable financial entanglements involving Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. The series, which revealed that Justice Thomas failed to disclose lavish gifts he had received from wealthy supporters, prompted the court to issue a new ethical code of conduct.

Cox Media Group, which owns WHIO, was runner-up in the public service category.

The prize for investigations went to Hannah Dreier of The Times, for an exposé of migrant child labor in the modern United States, and the governmental blunders and disregard that have allowed the illegal practice to persist. This was the second Pulitzer awarded to Dreier, who won the 2019 feature writing prize for her coverage of the criminal gang MS-13 for ProPublica.

The Times received the international reporting prize for its coverage of the war in the Middle East. The newspaper’s foreign staff produced an array of stories that encompassed the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, the errors by Israeli defense forces that left its citizens vulnerable and the consequences for Palestinian civilians of Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza.

The Pulitzer board also issued a special citation for journalists covering the conflict, noting that “under horrific conditions, an extraordinary number of journalists have died in the effort to tell the stories of Palestinians and others in Gaza.” The citation comes at a moment when the Middle East reporting of many media outlets, including The Times, has become a focus of criticism from activists on all sides of the conflict.

The Washington Post shared the prize for national reporting for “Terror on Repeat,” an examination of the AR-15 rifle, a widely available weapon commonly used in deadly mass killings that is capable of firing hundreds of bullets in rapid succession. The Post described how the rifle had “given assailants the power to instantly turn everyday American gathering places into zones of gruesome violence.”

Reuters was the other winner for national reporting, for its examination of troubling practices at workplaces controlled by Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur, including the rocket company SpaceX and Tesla, the manufacturer of electric cars.

The Post was also recognized twice for its opinion journalism. The commentary prize went to Vladimir KaraMurza, a Russian activist and journalist who had contributed columns from a jail cell in Russia, where he has been detained by the government of President Putin. David E. Hoffman of The Post won the editorial writing prize for a series on authoritarians’ use of digital technology to squash dissent.